September 11, 2019
A Science Fiction Novel In which the Jews Become Overlords of the Post-Human Future
By Michael WeingradIn The Smoke, the latest from the British writer Simon Ings, “Bundists” turn into grotesque shape-shifters. The implications are at once unclear and unsettling.
The English writer Simon Ings is fascinated by the future, by how we imagine it, and by humanity’s self-destructive attempts to hasten or escape it. As a popular science writer, he is the author of two non-fiction books: one about the eye, the other about science under Soviet Communism. He has also published more than a half-dozen novels, lushly written if sometimes challengingly modernistic, that frequently take up themes from science fiction.
The latest novel, which appeared in paperback earlier this year, is The Smoke. Written in gorgeous, unsettling prose, and set in a late 20th century whose history differs from our own, The Smoke is by turns poignant and horrific. Much of its horror has to do with Ings’s imagining of the Jews.
In the alternate timestream of The Smoke, the United States never came to global dominance; instead, a volcanic eruption in the 19th century made parts of North America uninhabitable. Meanwhile, in Europe, World War I came to an early and decisive end in 1916 when a precociously invented atom bomb was dropped on Berlin. As for World War II and the Holocaust, they never happened. A passing comment informs us that, in the world of The Smoke, Adolf Hitler choked to death on a grape.